The Old Wives' Tale eBook

BOOK I

MRS. BAINES

CHAPTER I

THE SQUARE

I

Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid
no heed to the manifold interest of their situation,
of which, indeed, they had never been conscious.
They were, for example, established almost precisely
on the fifty-third parallel of latitude. A little
way to the north of them, in the creases of a hill
famous for its religious orgies, rose the river Trent,
the calm and characteristic stream of middle England.
Somewhat further northwards, in the near neighbourhood
of the highest public-house in the realm, rose two
lesser rivers, the Dane and the Dove, which, quarrelling
in early infancy, turned their backs on each other,
and, the one by favour of the Weaver and the other
by favour of the Trent, watered between them the whole
width of England, and poured themselves respectively
into the Irish Sea and the German Ocean. What
a county of modest, unnoticed rivers! What a
natural, simple county, content to fix its boundaries
by these tortuous island brooks, with their comfortable
names—­Trent, Mease, Dove, Tern, Dane, Mees,
Stour, Tame, and even hasty Severn! Not that
the Severn is suitable to the county! In the county
excess is deprecated. The county is happy in not
exciting remark. It is content that Shropshire
should possess that swollen bump, the Wrekin, and
that the exaggerated wildness of the Peak should lie
over its border. It does not desire to be a pancake
like Cheshire. It has everything that England
has, including thirty miles of Watling Street; and
England can show nothing more beautiful and nothing
uglier than the works of nature and the works of man
to be seen within the limits of the county. It
is England in little, lost in the midst of England,
unsung by searchers after the extreme; perhaps occasionally
somewhat sore at this neglect, but how proud in the
instinctive cognizance of its representative features
and traits!

Constance and Sophia, busy with the intense preoccupations
of youth, recked not of such matters. They were
surrounded by the county. On every side the fields
and moors of Staffordshire, intersected by roads and
lanes, railways, watercourses and telegraph-lines,
patterned by hedges, ornamented and made respectable
by halls and genteel parks, enlivened by villages at
the intersections, and warmly surveyed by the sun,
spread out undulating. And trains were rushing
round curves in deep cuttings, and carts and waggons
trotting and jingling on the yellow roads, and long,
narrow boats passing in a leisure majestic and infinite
over the surface of the stolid canals; the rivers had
only themselves to support, for Staffordshire rivers
have remained virgin of keels to this day. One
could imagine the messages concerning prices, sudden
death, and horses, in their flight through the wires